Keep at it!

Writing prompts can be great (and we’ve certainly shared many of them with you here). They can help when your stuck and you simply need a reason to sting words together or get your butt back in the writing chair. But they don’t typically help you start or finish a writing project. The only way to do this is, as Achebe reminds us, is to keep at it.

Over the past few years, we have thought a lot about how to help writers finish their projects and then how to revise those early drafts on their own. We are working on more significant guidance on this path, but in the meantime we’ll be posting exercises (here and on our instagram page) to help you keep at it. These will not be writing prompts, but rather invitations to play with your current project. Our hope is that they will help you hone, rethink, or even salvage bits of your work in progress (be it an essay, book, or article).

Ideally, some of these exercises will become part of your toolkit, useful things to pull out when you find yourself in need of ways to keep at it. If all goes well, it will be like a stern little editor is sitting on your shoulder urging you to make that section better, or to rethink this paragraph, and I won't actually have to come to your house.